Inspiration Can Come from Anywhere: Part 2

In this section on “Inspiration Can Come from Anywhere”, I am going to write about the transition from room divider to poster image that the “Beware of Dog” panel went through.

To add more interest and to just have more fun, I decided to add a border around the original image of the “Beware of Dog”. This process took a lot of steps, but was a wildly rewarding part of the journey.

I work in Photoshop which I find far more entertaining than any computer game I have ever tried.

I took the photo of the “Beware of Dog” and set it up on a clipboard in Photoshop and started adding different widths and colors of borders until I was satisfied with how the whole arrangement looked.

Since I had used runes in the palms on the original image, I decided to create a series of runes out of coyote toe bones. I found the coyote toe bones at one of the shows in Tucson that happens during the Tucson Gem & Mineral Show. Let me tell you, there is a lot more than gems and minerals in Tucson during this series of shows that happens twice a year, but the best time to go is in February to the winter show.

There must be 40 different shows going on in Tucson at this time and there are some very interesting shows to see.

I found the coyote toe bones at the Electric Park show that is very near The Best Bead Show where Frantz Art Glass has a booth every year.

The Electric Park show has a very unique blend of rocks, butterflies, bones and what-nots for sale. I was really jazzed when I found the coyote toe bones because they were so beautiful and regularly shaped.

To create runes for the border of the poster image, I photographed the toe bones arranged to represent different runes. This went pretty smoothly, but it gave me chills while I was taking the photos. As an after thought, I decided to take some photos of just single bones encase I came up with some way to use it later on.

Well, as it turned out, I went wild over the way the toe bones worked as runes and I decided to make a whole alphabet out of toe bones that I used to make a statement at the top of the poster image.

It was so intriguing to create the bone alphabet that I spent hours and hours making the letters and setting them up so that I could drag and drop them anywhere on my image. The statement that I placed at the top of the poster image goes like this: “The Wisdom of the Universe is Stored in Stones and Bones”.

To finish off the border design, I placed copper leaf palm prints in each corner of the poster image that have the same runes on them that occur in the original center image. The toe bone runes that cover three sides of the border are not arranged to create a group meaning, but instead are use for their separate essential meanings. I placed a couple of little runes in red at the end of the ‘stones and bones’ statement, just because it felt right.

Prints of “Beware of Dog” are available for purchase. Contact me through my website which you can reach by clicking on the dog logo at the top of this post.

ETSY SALE & NEW ART PRINTS!!!

I'm having a sale on the beads in my Etsy Shop: 15% to 20% OFF!

I've also begun listing my art prints. If you are interested in purchasing prints in a different size from what I've listed for sale currently, then just contact me and we can work it out. There are also other images on my website that you can contact me about ordering.

Hope you enjoy them and thanks for looking!

Inspiration Can Come From Anywhere “Part 1”

This may become a recurring theme of mine, but I think it is important that non-artists know how the creative process can manifest itself to motivate an artist to generate a particular piece of art.

In this posting, I want to tell the story of how I came to make the project that I call “Beware of Dog”. The original project was done on a 3 foot by 4 foot piece of drywall that I made into a room divider for my office at work, to cut down on the office noise in my work area.

The image that I used on the out facing side of the room divider was inspired by a graffiti image of a crazy looking two legged dog that I saw on a 500 year old wall in the center of the oldest part of Florence, Italy. This dog had been done in bright yellow spray paint on a fine old brick wall. I was very charmed by this crude spray painted image and decided to use a recreation of it on my room divider. I saw the graffiti dog for the first time about 3 ½ years ago and I was very surprised when I returned to Florence this spring and found that the graffiti dog had not been removed or changed in any way. I guess that the Italians feel very differently about graffiti than most folks in America, where we paint over it and discourage people from marking buildings with graffiti.

Since the dog image was on a 500 year old wall, I decided to add Latin phrases to the image because that was the language that was spoken at the time that the wall was erected. The three phrases I chose were “Cave Canem” which means “Beware of Dog”, the second phrase is “Carpe Diem” which means “Seize the Day” and the last phrase, running along under the dog, is “Aut viam inveniam aut facium!” which means “Either I shall find a way, or I shall make one”, that is credited to Hannibal.

The last surface design I added to the “Beware of Dog” image is a set of hand prints in the upper corners that bare runes on the palms of each hand. The runes are part of an ancient Northern writing system that is now considered a dead language.

The materials that I used on the dog panel were textured spray paint to create the background which gave it the look of an outdoor wall and the dog was painted in latex craft paint. The phrases were carved into the drywall to give the affect of graffiti that is carved into trees and the hand prints were covered in copper leaf to give them a shimmering attitude.

Once I had the piece finished, I edged the drywall in wood and put a long flat 4 inch wide board along the top of the piece to use as a brace to attach the room divider to the wall for stability.

Once the piece was mounted, I finished the installation with pieces of big bones, small sculptures and stones. For a quirky touch, I drilled a hole in the end of the bone that hung over the edge of the piece and made a hanging fetch out of a plastic skeleton with some beads and feathers.

Before I installed the room divider, I took photos of the piece so that I could use the image for future projects.

I have posted a photo of the original graffiti dog, the finished panel before installation and a couple of photos of the panel after it was installed in my office.

Prints of "Beware of Dog" are available for purchase. Contact me if you are interested.

Lark Books "Masters: Glass Beads"

The book “Masters: Glass Beads” has finally been released and I must admit that I am very pleased with how it came out. It is the loveliest book about contemporary glass beadmakers and their beads I have ever seen. It is delicious eye candy and an excellent publication for anyone who likes beads.

A great side benefit of the publication of this book is that all the beadmakers who are in the book were invited to be involved in a bead show in Kobe, Japan at the Lampworked Glass Museum located there.

I jumped at the opportunity to be in the show in Japan because they want some of my beads for their permanent collection and they are willing to sell my beads for me at the show. This is a win-win situation because I have been involved with this museum before and had a positive experience with them.

I have my new website up now at http://www.patriciafrantzstudios.com, that I totally developed myself by learning Dreamweaver and Photoshop software programs. The website will always be a work in progress as I develop new pages and add more in-depth information.

About Glass Beads

I thought I would talk about a medium I have been working in for twenty years which is lampworked glass beads. I am in a new book published by Lark Books called “Masters: Glass Beads” that has bios and photos of 40 bead makers, and their beads, who have a long history of making fine lampworked glass beads. This publication will be out in May and can be pre-ordered through Amazon.com.

I have had a 20 year obsession with glass bead lampworking and consider it time well spent. For those who do not know, making glass beads in a torch is both hypnotic and addictive. It is such an absorbing process that it makes everything outside of the glass in the flame go away. It is so absorbing that I have to have a clock right in front of me when I work, so that I do not work for too many hours in a row.

Making glass beads came about organically for me after a friend of mine brought some Italian glass rods to me over 25 years ago. I couldn’t find anyone who could or would teach me to make beads, so I figured it out on my own by looking at photos of very old Italian glass beads.

As time went on, I got really heavy into a crystal coated glass called dichroic, which is very bright and sparkles a lot. Dichroic glass is a really weird thing to work with because your are dealing with bent light like with the rainbow produced by a prism and not a pigment. I have included a photo of a group of dichroic beads that I really like because the colors turned out so rich that I almost want to eat them.

From Photo to Art Image

I’m really tired tonight, but I did manage to get a project finished from the frost photo that I posted yesterday. I have so much fun when I get into the groove with an art project in Photoshop. In fact, I find it hard to stop and play a computer game or surf the web.

In spite of all my talk about loving to use Photoshop, I still like working directly in a number of mediums like paint, felt-tip pens, oil pastels, pencils, clay and even hot glass. If I get lucky, something comes out to where I can scan what I made in another medium and then make it into something else on the computer – double the fun!

Check out the frost image I have posted.

Where Inspiration Comes From

I was watching my cats watch a vibrating cat toy dance across my wooden floor and thought – Wow isn’t this fun! But it got me thinking about where inspiration for creative projects comes from. As I mused upon this subject, I was reminded of a photo of my frosted car windshield that I took one morning in the freezing cold last month. It was one of those inspired photo moments and it produced some very nice images of the magic of frozen water crystals. I am currently using one of these frost photos as the starting point for one of my next projects.

My point being, that inspiration can come from anywhere at anytime when you least expect it and I find that to be a wonderful thing. Grabbing those inspirational moments is one of the reasons I started taking photos when ever I saw something that peaked my interest, whether it is a rusty piece of pipe or a beautiful sky full of clouds.

Speaking of photos, I love my digital cameras and the Photoshop software to work on them with. I first learned photography with a 35mm camera and though it was possible to get good photos, it is a lot easier to interact with my digital images. I got myself a nice little portal scanner and scanned all my 35mm images into my computer to add to my image library.

Another thing I like to do is request photos from other people when they go on trips to places I have never been and might never go to. This allows me to see the world through someone else’s eyes and I get some surprising results, making it worth while to be a bit of a pest to get photos from these other people.

Be sure to check my next post for the finished image made from the frost photo that I mentioned above.

* “I am but the shadow of a mouse on the surface of the second moon” *

Art and the Artist

I have been an artist for as long as I can remember and I have written articles for magazines about art, but this is the first time I have put forth my personal musings about art and the creative process as I experience it.

I have expressed my creative urges in many different mediums, but for the past couple of years, I have focused on learning to use computer software to create images that can be used in many different ways. I never thought I would enjoy working on a computer to create art, but as I finally developed a broad enough skill set in Photoshop, I found that it was so much fun and empowering. I use to do graphic art in the early 70's and at that point in time, it was really hard because none of the software programs that we take for granted these days even existed and it was all done by cut and paste - really time consuming stuff!

Today I am posting one of my latest attempts of a self portrait called "The Density of Smoke - A self portrait in Sepia", where the pattern in the background is a recreation of an algorithm for the density of smoke. I feel that the algorithm is so neat looking that I had to use it somewhere in my portrait because I sometimes feel like I have the physical density of smoke.

I am fascinated at how the algorithm for the density of smoke insinuated itself into my self portrait. I read constantly and I see thousands of words and images, but this one algorithm jumped out at me and caused me to want to inhabit the same space as it, in what ever manner I could.